Third Part: Ethical Life
i The Family

The family, as the immediate substantiality of mind, is
specifically characterised by love, which is mind's feeling of
its own unity. Hence in a family, one's frame of mind is to have
self-consciousness of one's individuality within this unity as
the absolute essence of oneself, with the result that one is in
it not as an independent person but as a member.

Addition: Love means in general terms the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not in selfish isolation but win my self-consciousness
only as the renunciation of my independence and through knowing
myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with
me. Love, however, is feeling, i.e. ethical life in the form
of something natural. In the state, feeling disappears; there
we are conscious of unity as law; there the content must be rational
and known to us. The first moment in love is that I do not wish
to be a self-subsistent and independent person and that, if I
were, then I would feel defective and incomplete. The second
moment is that I find myself in another person, that I count for
something in the other, while the other in turn comes to count
for something in me. Love, therefore, is the most tremendous
contradiction; the Understanding cannot resolve it since there
is nothing more stubborn than this point (Punktualität)of self-consciousness which is negated and which nevertheless
I ought to possess as affirmative. Love is at once the propounding
and the resolving of this contradiction. As the resolving of
it, love is unity of an ethical type.

§ 159

The right which the individual enjoys on the strength
of the family unity and which is in the first place simply the
individual's life within this unity, takes on the form of right
(as the abstract moment of determinate individuality) only when
the family begins to dissolve. At that point those who should
be family-members both in their inclination and in actuality begin
to be self-subsistent persons, and whereas they formerly constituted
one specific moment within the whole, they now receive their share
separately and so only in an external fashion by way of money,
food, educational expenses, and the like.

Addition:
The right of the family properly consists in the fact that its
substantiality should have determinate existence. Thus it is
a right against externality and against secessions from the family
unity. On the other hand, to repeat, love is a feeling, something
subjective, against which unity cannot make itself effective.
The demand for unity can be sustained, then, only in relation
to such things as are by nature external and not conditioned by
feeling.

§ 160

The family is completed in these three phases:

(a)Marriage, the form assumed by the concept of the family in its immediate phase;

(b)Family Property and Capital (the external embodiment of the concept) and attention to these;

(c)The Education of Children and the Dissolution of the Family.

A. Marriage

§ 161

Marriage, as the immediate type of ethical relationship,
contains first, the moment of physical life; and since marriage
is a substantial tie, the life involved in it is life in its totality,
i.e. as the actuality of the race and its life-process. But,
secondly, in self-consciousness the natural sexual union — a union
purely inward or implicit and for that very reason existent as
purely external — is changed into a union on the level of mind,
into self-conscious love.

Addition: Marriage is in essence an ethical tie. Formerly, especially in most systems of natural law, attention was paid only to the physical
side of marriage or to its natural character. Consequently, it
was treated only as a sex relationship, and this completely barred
the way to its other characteristics. This is crude enough, but
it is no less so to think of it as only a civil contract, and
even Kant does this. On this view, the parties are bound by a
contract of mutual caprice, and marriage is thus degraded to the
level of a contract for reciprocal use. A third view of marriage
is that which bases it on love alone, but this must be rejected
like the other two, since love is only a feeling and so is exposed
in every respect to contingency, a guise which ethical life may
not assume. Marriage, therefore, is to be more precisely characterised
as ethico-legal (rechtlich sittliche) love, and this eliminates from marriage the transient, fickle, and purely subjective aspects of love.

§ 162

On the subjective side, marriage may have a more obvious
source in the particular inclination of the two persons who are
entering upon the marriage tie, or in the foresight and contrivance
of the parents, and so forth. But its objective source lies in
the free consent of the persons, especially in their consent to
make themselves one person, to renounce their natural and individual
personality to this unity of one with the other. From this point
of view, their union is a self-restriction, but in fact it is
their liberation, because in it they attain their substantive
self-consciousness.

Remark:
Our objectively appointed end and so our ethical duty is to enter
the married state. The external origin of any particular marriage
is in the lure of the case contingent, and it depends principally
on the extent which reflective thought has been developed. At
one extreme, the step is that the marriage is arranged by the
contrivance of benevolent parents; the appointed end of the parties
is a union of mutual love, their inclination to marry arises from
the fact that each grows acquainted with the other from the first
as a destined partner. At the other extreme, it is the inclination
of the parties which comes first, appearing in them as these two infinitely particularised individuals. The more ethical way to matrimony may be taken to
be the former extreme or any way at all whereby the decision to marry comes first and the inclination to do so follows, so that in the actual wedding both decision and inclination coalesce. In the latter extreme, it is the uniqueness of the infinitely particularised which makes good its claims in accordance with the subjective principle of the modern world (see Remark to § 124).

But those works of modern art, dramatic and other, in which the
love of the sexes is the main interest, are pervaded by a chill
despite the heat of passion they portray, for they associate the
passion with accident throughout and represent the entire dramatic
interest as if it rested solely on the characters as these
individuals; what rests on them may indeed be of infinite
importance to them, but is of none whatever in itself.

Addition: Amongst peoples who hold the female sex in scant respect, marriages are arranged by the parents at will without consulting the young
people. The latter raise no objection, since at that level of
culture the particularity of feeling makes no claims for itself.
For the woman it is only a matter of getting a husband, for the
man, of getting a wife. In other social conditions, considerations
of wealth, connections, political ends, may be the determining
factor. In such circumstances, great hardships may arise through
making marriage a means to other ends. Nowadays, however, the
subjective origin of marriage, the state of being in love, is
regarded as the only important originating factor. Here the position
is represented to be that a man must wait until his hour has struck
and that he can bestow his love only on one specific individual.

§ 163

The ethical aspect of marriage consists in the parties' consciousness
of this unity as their substantive aim, and so in their love,
trust, and common sharing of their entire existence as individuals.
When the parties are in this frame of mind and their union is
actual, their physical passion sinks to the level of a physical
moment, destined to vanish in its very satisfaction. On the other
hand, the spiritual bond of union secures its rights as the substance
of marriage and thus rises, inherently indissoluble, to a plane
above the contingency of passion and the transience of particular
caprice.

Remark: It was noted above (in § 75)that marriage, so far as its essential basis is concerned, is not a contractual relation. On the contrary, though marriage begins in contract, it is precisely
a contract to transcend the standpoint of contract, the standpoint
from which persons are regarded in their individuality as self-subsistent
units. The identification of personalities, whereby the family
becomes one person and its members become its accidents (though
substance is in essence the relation of accidents to itself),
is the ethical mind. Taken by itself and stripped of the manifold
externals of which it is possessed owing to its embodiment in
these individuals and the interests of the phenomenal realm, interests
limited in time and numerous other ways, this mind emerges in
a shape for representative thinking and has been revered as Penates,
&c.; and in general it is in this mind that the religious
character of marriage and the family, or pietas, is grounded.
It is a further abstraction still to separate the divine, or
the substantive, from its body, and then to stamp it, together
with the feeling and consciousness of mental unity, as what is
falsely called 'Platonic' love. This separation is in keeping
with the monastic doctrine which characterises the moment of physical
life as purely negative and which, precisely by thus separating
the physical from the mental, endows the former by itself with
infinite importance.

Addition: The distinction between marriage and concubinage is that the latter is chiefly a matter of satisfying natural desire, while this satisfaction
is made secondary in the former. It is for this reason that physical
experiences may be mentioned in married life without a blush,
although outside the marriage tie their mention would produce
a sense of shame. But it is on this account, too, that marriage
must be regarded as in principle indissoluble, for the end of
marriage is the ethical end, an end so lofty that everything else
is manifestly powerless against it and made subject to it. Marriage
is not to be dissolved because of passion, since passion is subordinate
to it. But it is not indissoluble except in principle, since
as Christ says, only 'for the hardness of your heart' is divorce
established. Since marriage has feeling for one of its moments,
it is not absolute but weak and potentially dissoluble. Legislators,
however, must make its dissolution as difficult as possible and
uphold the right of the ethical order against caprice.

§ 164

Mere agreement to the stipulated terms of a contrast in itself
involves the genuine transfer of the property in question (see
§ 79).
Similarly, the solemn declaration by the parties
of their consent to enter the ethical bond of marriage, and its
corresponding recognition and confirmation by their family and
community, constitutes the formal completion and actuality of marriage.
The knot is tied and made ethical only after this ceremony, whereby
through the use of signs, i.e. of language (the most mental embodiment
of mind — see § 78),
the substantial thing in the marriage is brought completely into being. As a result, the sensuous moment, the one proper to physical life, is put into its ethical place
as something only consequential and accidental, belonging to the
external embodiment of the ethical bond, which indeed can subsist
exclusively in reciprocal love and support.

Remark: If with a view to framing or criticising legal enactments, the question is asked: what should be regarded as the chief end of
marriage?, the question may be taken to mean: which single facet
of marriage in its actuality is to be regarded as the most essential
one? No one facet by itself, however, makes up the whole range
of its implicit and explicit content, i.e. of its ethical character,
and one or other of its facets may be lacking in an existing marriage
without detriment to the essence of marriage itself.

It is in the actual conclusion of a marriage, i.e. in the wedding,
that the essence of the tie is expressed and established beyond
dispute as something ethical, raised above the contingency of
feeling and private inclination. If this ceremony is taken as
an external formality, a mere so-called 'civil requirement', it
is thereby stripped of all significance except perhaps that of
serving the purpose of edification and attesting the civil relation
of the parties. It is reduced indeed to a mere fiat of a civil
or ecclesiastical authority. As such it appears as something
not merely indifferent to the true nature of marriage, but actually
alien to it. The heart is constrained by the law to attach a
value to the formal ceremony and the latter is looked upon merely
as a condition which must precede the complete mutual surrender
of the parties to one another. As such it appears to bring disunion
into their loving disposition and, like an alien intruder, to
thwart the inwardness of their union. Such a doctrine ,.pretentiously
claims to afford the highest conception of the freedom, 'inwardness,
and perfection of love; but in fact it is a travesty of the ethical
aspect of love, the higher aspect which restrains purely sensual
impulse and puts it in the background. Such restraint is already
present at the instinctive level in shame, and it rises to chastity
and modesty as consciousness becomes more specifically intelligent.
In particular, the view just criticised casts aside marriage's
specifically ethical character, which consists in this, that the
consciousness of the parties is crystallised out of its physical
and subjective mode and lifted to the thought of what is substantive;
instead of continually reserving to itself the contingency and
caprice of bodily desire, it removes the marriage bond from the
province of this caprice, surrenders to the substantive, and swears
allegiance to the Penates; the physical moment it subordinates
until it becomes something wholly conditioned by the true and
ethical character of the marriage relation and by the recognition
of the bond as an ethical one. It is effrontery and its buttress,
the Understanding, which cannot apprehend the speculative character
of the substantial tie; nevertheless, with this speculative character
there correspond both ethical purity of heart and the legislation
of Christian peoples.

Addition: Friedrich von Schlegel in his Lucinde, and a follower of his in the Briefe eines Ungenannten, I have put forward
the view that the wedding ceremony is superfluous and a formality
which might be discarded. Their reason is that love is, so they
say, the substance of marriage and that the celebration therefore
detracts from its worth. Surrender to sensual impulse is here
represented as necessary to prove the freedom and inwardness of
love — an argument not unknown to seducers.

It must be noticed in connection with sex-relations that a girl
in surrendering her body loses her honour. With a man, however,
the case is otherwise, because he has a field for ethical activity
outside the family. A girl is destined in essence for the marriage
tie and for that only; it is therefore demanded of her that her
love shall take the form of marriage and that the different moments
in love shall attain their true rational relation to each other.

§ 165

The difference in the physical characteristics of the two sexes
has a rational basis and consequently acquires an intellectual
and ethical significance. This significance is determined by
the difference into which the ethical substantiality, as the concept,
internally sunders itself in order that its vitality may become
a concrete unity consequent upon this difference.

§ 166

Thus one sex is mind in its self-diremption into explicit personal
self-subsistence and the knowledge and volition of free universality,
i.e. the self-consciousness of conceptual thought and the volition
of the objective final end. The other sex is mind maintaining
itself in unity as knowledge and volition of the substantive,
but knowledge and volition in the form of concrete individuality
and feeling. In relation to externality, the former is powerful
and active, the latter passive and subjective. It follows that
man has his actual substantive life in the state, in learning,
and so forth, as well as in labour and struggle with the external
world and with himself so that it is only out of his diremption
that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself.
In the family he has a tranquil intuition of this unity, and
there he lives a subjective ethical life on the plane of feeling.
Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the
family, and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame
of mind.

Remark:
For this reason, family piety is expounded in Sophocles' Antigone
— one of the most sublime presentations of this virtue — as principally
the law of woman, and as the law of a substantiality at once subjective
and on the plane of feeling, the law of the inward life, a life
which has not yet attained its full actualisation; as the law
of the ancient gods, 'the Gods of the underworld; as 'an everlasting
law, and no man knows at what time it was first put forth'. This
law is there displayed as a law opposed to public law, to the
law of the land. This is the supreme opposition in ethics and
therefore in tragedy; and it is individualised in the same play
in the opposing natures of man and woman.

Addition:
Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy, and certain forms of artistic production. Women may have happy ideas, taste, and elegance, but they cannot attain
to the ideal. [Ideale. By this word Hegel means
'the Beautiful and whatever tends thither' (Science of Logic,
i. 163, footnote). It is to be distinguished, therefore,
from Ideelle] The difference between men and women is like
that between animals and plants. Men correspond to animals, while
women correspond to plants because their development is more placid
and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity
of feeling. When women hold the helm of government, the state
is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not
by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and
opinions. Women are educated — who knows how? — as it were by
breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge.
The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by
the stress of thought and much technical exertion.

§ 167

In essence marriage is monogamy because it is personality — immediate
exclusive individuality — which enters into this tie and surrenders
itself to it; and hence the tie's truth and inwardness (i.e. the
subjective form of its substantiality) proceeds only from the
mutual, whole-hearted, surrender of this personality. Personality
attains its right of being conscious of itself in another only
in so far as the other is in this identical relationship as a
person, i.e. as an atomic individual.

Remark:
Marriage, and especially monogamy, is one of the absolute principles
I on which the ethical life of a community depends. Hence marriage
comes to be recorded as one of the moments in the founding of
states by gods or heroes.

§ 168

Further, marriage results from the free surrender by both sexes
of their personality — a personality in every possible way unique
in each of the parties. Consequently, it ought not to be entered
by two people identical in stock who are already acquainted and
perfectly known to one another; for individuals in the same circle
of relationship have no special personality of their own in contrast
with that of others in the same circle. On the contrary, the
parties should be drawn from separate families and their personalities
should be different in origin. Since the very conception of marriage
is that it is a freely undertaken ethical transaction, not a tie
directly grounded in the physical organism and its desires, it
follows that the marriage of blood-relations runs counter to this
conception and so also to genuine natural feeling.

Remark:
Marriage itself is sometimes said to he grounded not in natural
rights but simply in instinctive sexual impulses; or again it
is treated as a contract with an arbitrary basis. External arguments
in support of monogamy have been drawn from physical considerations
such as the number of men and women. Dark feelings of repulsion
are advanced as the sole ground for prohibiting consanguineous
marriage. the basis of all these views is the fashionable idea
of a state of nature and a natural origin for rights, and the
lack of the concept of rationality and freedom.

Addition: A sense of shame — to go no farther — is a bar to consanguineous marriage. But this repugnance finds justification in the concept
of the thing. What is already united, I mean, cannot be united
for the first time by marriage. It is a commonplace of stock-breeding
that the offspring is comparatively weak when animals of the same
stock arc mated, since if there is to be unification there must
first be division. The force of generation, as of mind, is all
the greater, the greater the oppositions out of which it is reproduced.
Familiarity, close acquaintance, the habit of common pursuits,
should not precede marriage; they should come about for the first
time within it. And their development has all the more value,
the richer it is and the more facets it has.

§ 169

The family, as person, has its real external existence in property;
and it is only when this property takes the form of capital that
it becomes the embodiment of the substantial personality of the
family.

B. The Family Capital

§ 170

It is not merely property which a family possesses; as a universal
and enduring person, it requires possessions specifically determined
as permanent and secure, i.e. it requires capital. The arbitrariness
of a single owner's particular needs is one moment in property
taken abstractly; but this moment, together with the selfishness
of desire, is here transformed into something ethical, into labour
and care for a common possession.

Remark:
In the sagas of the founding of states, or at least of a social
and orderly life, the introduction of permanent property is linked
with the introduction of marriage. The nature of this capital,
however, and the proper means of its consolidation will appear
in the section on civil society.

§ 171

The family as a legal entity in relation to others must be represented
by the husband as its head. Further, it is his prerogative to
go out and work for its living, to attend to its needs, and to
control and administer its capital. This capital is common property
so that, while no member of the family has property of his own,
each has his right in the common stock. This right, however,
may come into collision with the head of the family's right of
administration owing to the fact that the ethical temper of the
family is still only at the level of immediacy (see §
158) and so is exposed to partition and contingency.

§ 172

A marriage brings into being a new family which is self-subsistent
and independent of the clans or 'houses' from which its members
have been drawn. The tie between these and the new family has
a natural basis — consanguinity, but the new family is based on
love of an ethical type. Thus an individual's property too has
an essential connection with his conjugal relationship and only
a comparatively remote one with his relation to his clan or 'house'.

Remark:
The significance of marriage settlements which impose a restriction
on the couple's common ownership of their goods, of arrangements
to secure continued legal assistance for the woman, and so forth,
ties in their being provisions in case of the dissolution of the
marriage, either naturally by death, or by divorce, &c. They
are also safeguards for securing that in such an eventuality the
different members of the family shall secure their share of the
common stock.

Addition: In many legal codes the wider circle of the clan is adhered to, and this is regarded as the essential bond, while the other bond,
that of each particular family, appears less important in comparison.
Thus in the older Roman law, the wife in the easily dissolved
type of marriage stood in a closer relation to her kinsfolk than
to her husband and children. Under feudal law, again, the maintenance
of the splendor familiae made it necessary for only the
males of the family to be reckoned members and for the clan as
a whole to count as the important thing, while the newly founded
family disappeared in comparison. Nevertheless, each new family
is the essential thing in contrast with the more remote connections
of clan-kinship, and parents and children form the nucleus proper
as opposed to the clan, which is also in a certain sense called
a 'family'. Hence an individual's relation to his wealth must
have a more essential connection with his marriage than with the
wider circle of his kin.

C. The Education of Children and the Dissolution of the Family

§ 173

In substance marriage is a unity, though only a unity of inwardness
or disposition; in outward existence, however, the unity is sundered
in the two parties. It is only in the children that the unity
itself exists externally, objectively, and explicitly as a unity,
because the parents love the children as their love, as the embodiment
of their own substance. From the physical point of view, the
presupposition — persons immediately existent (as parents) — here
becomes a result, a process which runs away into the infinite
series of generations, each producing the next and presupposing
the one before. This is the mode in which the single mind of
the Penates reveals its existence in the finite sphere
of nature as a race.

Addition: The relation of love between husband and wife is in itself not objective, because even if their feeling is their substantial
unity, still this unity has no objectivity. Such an objectivity
parents first acquire in their children, in whom they can see
objectified the entirety of their union. In the child, a mother
loves its father and he its mother. Both have their love objectified
for them in the child. While in their goods their unity is embodied
only in an external thing, in their children it is embodied in
a spiritual one in which the parents are loved and which they
love.

§ 174

Children have the right to maintenance and education at the expense
of the family's common capital. The right of the parents to the
service as service of their children is based upon and is restricted
by the common task of looking after the family generally. Similarly,
the right of the parents over the wishes of their children is
determined by the object in view — discipline and education.
The punishment of children does not aim at justice as such; the
aim is more subjective and moral in character, i.e. to deter them
from exercising a freedom still in the tolls of nature and to
lift the universal into their consciousness and will.

Addition: Man has to acquire for himself the position which he ought to attain; he is not already in possession of it by instinct. It
is on this fact that the child's right to education is based.
Peoples under patriarchal government are in the same position
as children; they are fed from central stores and not regarded
as self-subsistent and adults. The services which may be demanded
from children should therefore have education as their sole end
and be relevant thereto; they must not be ends in themselves,
since a child in slavery is in the most unethical of all situations
whatever. One of the chief factors in education is discipline,
the purport of which is to break down the child's self-will and
thereby eradicate his purely natural and sensuous self. We must
not expect to achieve this by mere goodness, since it is just
the immediate will which acts on immediate fancies and caprices,
not on reasons and representative thinking. If we advance reasons
to children, we leave it open to them to decide whether the reasons
are weighty or not, and thus we make everything depend on their
whim. So far as children are concerned, universality and the
substance of things reside in, their parents, and this implies
that children must be obedient. If the feeling of subordination,
producing the longing to grow up, is not fostered in children,
they become forward and impertinent.

§ 175

Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies
nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things
and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.
In respect of his relation to the family, the child's education
has the positive aim of instilling ethical principles into him
in the form of an immediate feeling for which differences are
not yet explicit, so that thus equipped with the foundation of
an ethical life, his heart may live its early years in love, trust,
and obedience. In respect of the same relation, this education
has the negative aim of raising children out of the instinctive,
physical, level on which they are originally, to self-subsistence
and freedom of personality and so to the level on which they have
power to leave the natural unity of the family.

Remark:
One of the blackest marks against Roman legislation is the law
whereby children were treated by their fathers as slaves. This
gangrene of the ethical order at the tenderest point of its innermost
life is one of the most important clues for understanding the
place of the Romans in the history of the world and their tendency
towards legal formalism.

The necessity for education is present in children as their own
feeling of dissatisfaction with themselves as they are, as the
desire to belong to the adult world whose superiority they divine,
as the longing to grow up. The play theory of education assumes
that what is childish is itself already something of inherent
worth and presents it as such to the children; in their eyes it
lowers serious pursuits, and education itself, to a form of childishness
for which the children themselves have scant respect. The advocates
of this method represent the child, in the immaturity in which
he feels himself to be, as really mature and they struggle to
make him satisfied with himself as he is. But they corrupt and
distort his genuine and proper need for something better, and
create in him a blind indifference to the substantial ties of
the intellectual world, a contempt of his elders because they
have thus posed before him, a child, in a contemptible and childish
fashion, and finally a vanity and conceit which feeds on the notion
of its own superiority.

Addition: As a child, man must have lived with his parents encircled by their love and trust, and rationality must appear in him as his
very own subjectivity. In the early years it is education by
the mother especially which is important, since ethical principles
must be implanted in the child in the form of feeling. It is
noteworthy that on the whole children love their parents less
than their parents love them. The reason for this is that they
are gradually increasing in strength, and are learning to stand
on their own feet, and so are leaving their parents behind them.
The parents, on the other hand, possess in their children the
objective embodiment of their union.

§ 176

Marriage is but the ethical Idea in its immediacy and so
has its objective actuality only in the inwardness of subjective
feeling and disposition. In this fact is rooted the fundamental
contingency of marriage in the world of existence. There can
be no compulsion on people to marry; and, on the other hand, there
is no merely legal or positive bond which can hold the parties
together once their dispositions and actions have become hostile
and contrary. A third ethical authority, however, is called for
to maintain the right of marriage — an ethical substantiality
— against the mere whims of hostile disposition or the accident
of a purely passing mood, and so forth. Such an authority distinguishes
these from the total estrangement of the two parties and may not
grant divorce until it is satisfied that the estrangement is total.

Addition: It is because marriage depends entirely on feeling, something subjective and contingent, that it may be dissolved. The state,
on the other hand, is not subject to partition, because it rests
on law. To be sure, marriage ought to be indissoluble,
but here again we have to stop at this 'ought'; yet, since marriage
is an ethical institution, it cannot be dissolved at will but
only by an ethical authority, whether the church or the law-court.
If the parties are completely estranged, e.g. owing to adultery,
then even the ecclesiastical authority must permit divorce.

§ 177

The ethical dissolution of the family consists in this, that once
the children have been educated to freedom of personality, and
have come of age, they become recognised as persons in the eyes
of the law and as capable of holding free property of their own
and founding families of their own, the sons as heads of new families,
the daughters as wives. They now have their substantive destiny
in the new family; the old family on the other hand falls into
the background as merely their ultimate basis and origin, while
a fortiori the clan is an abstraction, devoid of rights.

§ 178

The natural dissolution of the family by the death of the parents,
particularly the father, has inheritance as its consequence so
far as the family capital is concerned. The essence of inheritance
is the transfer to private ownership of property which is in principle
common. When comparatively remote degrees of kinship are in question,
and when persons and families are so dispersed in civil society
that they have begun to gain self-subsistence, this transfer becomes
the less hard and fast as the sense of family unity fades away
and as every marriage becomes the surrender of previous family
relationships and the founding of a new self-subsistent family.

Remark:
It has been suggested I that the basis of inheritance ties in
the fact that, by a man's death, his property becomes wealth without
an owner, and as such falls to the first person who takes possession
of it, because ,of course it is the relatives who are normally
nearest a man's death-bed and so they are generally the first
to take possession. Hence it is supposed that this customary
occurrence is made a rule by positive legislation in the interests
of orderliness. This ingenious idea disregards the ,nature of
family relationship.

§ 179

The result of this disintegration of the family is that a man
may at will either squander his capital altogether, mainly in
accordance with his private caprices, opinions, and ends, or else
look upon a circle of friends and acquaintances, &c., as if
they were his family and make a will embodying a declaration to
that effect, with the result that they become his legal heirs.

Remark:
The ethical justification of freedom to dispose of one's property
by 'will to a circle of friends would depend on the formation
of such a circle; there goes to its formation so much accident,
arbitrariness, and self-seeking, &c. — especially since testamentary
hopes have a bearing on readiness to enter it — that the ethical
moment in it is only something very vague. Further, the recognition
of a man's competence to bequeath his property arbitrarily is
much more likely to be an occasion for breach of ethical obligations
and for mean exertions and equally mean subservience; and it also
provides opportunity and justification for the folly, caprice,
and malice of attaching to professed benefactions and gifts vain,
tyrannical, and vexatious conditions operative after the testator's
death and so in any case after his property ceases to be his.

§ 180

The principle that the members of the family grow up to be self-subsistent
persons in the eyes of the law (see § 177) lets into the
circle of the family something of the same arbitrariness and discrimination
among the natural heirs, though its exercise there must be restricted
to a minimum in order to prevent injury to the basic family relationship.

Remark:
The mere downright arbitrariness of the deceased cannot be made
the principle underlying the right to make a will, especially
if it runs counter to the substantive right of the family. For
after all no respect would be forthcoming for his wishes after
his death, if not from the family's love and veneration for its
deceased fellow-member. Such arbitrariness by itself contains
nothing worthy of higher respect than the right of the family
as such — on the contrary.

The other ground for the validity of testamentary disposition
would consist simply in its arbitrary recognition by others.
But such an argument may prima facie be admitted only when family
ties, to which testamentary disposition is intrinsic, become remoter
and more ineffective. If they are actually present, however,
without being effective, the situation is unethical; and to give
extended validity to arbitrary dispositions at the expense of
family ties eo ipso weakens the ethical character of the
latter.

To make the father's arbitrary will within the family the main
principle of inheritance was part of the harsh and unethical legal
system of Rome to which reference has been made already. That
system even gave a father power to sell his son, and if the son
was manumitted by a third party, he came under his father's potestas
once more. Not until he was manumitted a third time was he
actually and finally free. The son never attained his majority
de jure nor did he become a person in law; the only property
he could hold was booty won in war (peculium castrense).
If he passed out of his father's potestas after being
thrice sold and manumitted, he did not inherit along with those
who had continued in bondage to the head of the family, unless
the will specifically so provided. Similarly, a wife remained
attached to her family of origin rather than to the new family
which by her marriage she had helped to found, and which was now
properly her own, and she was therefore precluded from inheriting
any share of the goods of what was properly her own family, for
neither wife nor mother shared in the distribution of an estate.

Later, with the growing feeling for rationality, the unethical
provisions of laws such as these and others were evaded in the
course of their administration, for example with the help of the
expression bonorum possessio instead of hereditas, and
through the fiction of nicknaming a filia a filius. This
was referred to above (see Remark to § 3) as the sad
necessity to which the judge was reduced in the face of bad laws
— the necessity of smuggling reason into them on the sly, or at
least into some of their consequences. Connected with this were
the terrible instability of the chief political institutions and
a riot of legislation to stem the outbreak of resulting evils.

From Roman history and the writings of Lucian and others, we are
sufficiently familiar with the unethical consequences of giving
the head of a Roman family the right to name whom he pleased as
his heir.

Marriage is ethical life at the level of immediacy; in the very
nature of the case, therefore, it must be a mixture of a substantial
tie with natural contingency and inner arbitrariness. Now when
by the slave-status of children, by legal provisions such as those
mentioned above as well as others consequential upon them, and
in addition by the ease of Roman divorce, pride of place is given
to arbitrariness instead of to the right of the substantial (so
that even Cicero — and what fine writing about the Honestum
and Decorum there is in his De Officiis and in all
sorts of other places! — even Cicero divorced his wife as a business
speculation in order to pay his debts with his new wife's dowry),
then a legal road is paved to the corruption of manners, or rather
the laws themselves necessitate such corruption.

The institution of heirs-at-law with a view to preserving the
family and its splendour by means of fideicommissa and
substitutiones (in order to favour sons by excluding daughters
from inheriting, or to favour the eldest son by excluding the
other children) is an infringement of the principle of the freedom
of property (see § 62), like the admission of any
other inequality in the treatment of heirs. And besides, such
an institution depends on an arbitrariness which in and by itself
has no right to recognition, or more precisely on the thought
of wishing to preserve intact not so much this family but
rather this clan or 'house'. Yet it is not this clan or
'house', but the family proper which is the Idea and which therefore
possesses the right to recognition, and both the ethical disposition
and family trees are much more likely to be preserved by freedom
of property and equality of inheritance than by the reverse of
these.

Institutions of this kind, like the Roman, wholly ignore the right
due to marriage, because by a marriage the foundation of a unique
actual family is eo ipso completed (see § 172), and because what is called, in contrast with the new family, the
family in the wide sense, i.e. the stirps or gens, becomes
only an abstraction (see § 177) growing less and less actual the further it recedes into the background as one generation
succeeds another. Love, the ethical moment in marriage, is by
its very nature a feeling for actual living individuals, not for
an abstraction. This abstraction of the Understanding [the gens]
appears in history as the principle underlying the contribution
of the Roman Empire to world history (see § 357).
In the higher sphere of the state, a right of primogeniture arises
together with estates rigidly entailed; it arises, however, not
arbitrarily but as the inevitable outcome of the Idea of the state.
On this point see below, § 306.

Addition: In earlier times, a Roman father had the right to disinherit his children and even kill them. Later he lost both these rights.
Attempts were made to forge into a legal system this incoherence
between unethical institutions and devices to rob them of that
character, and it is the retention of this incoherence which constitutes
the deficiency and difficulty of the German law of inheritance.
To be sure, the right to make a will must be conceded; but in
conceding it our point of view must be that this right of free
choice arises or is magnified with the dispersion and estrangement
of the members of the family. Further, the so-called 'family
of friends' which testamentary disposition brings with it may
be admitted only in defect of members of the family proper, i.e.
of spouse and children. To make a will at all entails something
obnoxious and disagreeable, because in making it I reveal the
names of my favourites. Favour, however, is arbitrary; it may
be gained surreptitiously by a variety of expedients, it may depend
on all sorts of foolish reasons, and as a condition of having
his name included in a will, a beneficiary may be required to
subject himself to the most abject servilities. In England, the
home of all sorts of eccentricity, there is no end to the folly
and whimsicality of bequests.

Transition of the Family into Civil Society

§ 181

The family disintegrates (both essentially, through the working
of the principle of personality, and also in the course of nature)
into a plurality of families, each of which conducts itself as
in principle a self-subsistent concrete person and therefore as
externally related to its neighbours. In other words, the moments
bound together in the unity of the family, since the family is
the ethical Idea still in its concept, must be released from the
concept to self-subsistent objective reality. This is the stage
of difference. This gives us, to use abstract language in the
first place, the determination of particularity which is related
to universality but in such a way that universality is its basic
principle, though still only an inward principle; for that reason,
the universal merely shows in the particular as its form. Hence
this relation of reflection prima facie portrays the disappearance
of ethical life or, since this life as the essence necessarily
shows itself, this relation constitutes the world of ethical appearance
— civil society.

Remark:
The expansion of the family, as its transition into a new principle,
is in the external world sometimes its peaceful expansion until
it becomes a people, i.e. a nation, which thus has a common natural
origin, or sometimes the federation of scattered groups of families
under the influence of an overlord's power or as a result of a
voluntary association produced by the tie of needs and the reciprocity
of their satisfaction.

Addition: The, starting-point for the universal here is the self-subsistence of the particular, and the ethical order seems therefore to be
lost at this point, since it is precisely the identity of the
family which consciousness takes to be the primary thing, the
divine, and the source of obligation. Now, however, a situation
arises in which the particular is to be my primary determining
principle, and thus my determinacy by ethical factors has been
annulled. But this is nothing but a pure mistake, since, while
I suppose that I am adhering to the particular, the universal
and the necessity of the link between particulars remains the
primary and essential thing. I am thus altogether on the level
of show, and while my particularity remains my determining principle,
i.e. my end, I am for that very reason the servant of the universal
which properly retains power over me in the last resort.